Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

54 pointsbrailsafe55 comments

I'm in the same hole as a ton of other people in Canada and the U.S, such that I'm unemployed and prospects are nil. What I'm seeing is that most companies, if they have any postings, have chosen to only advertise positions for people who are comically well-decorated; Principal engineers with 10 years of experience, plus the masters degree, plus a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium.

I've been some kind of software developer for nearly 10 years, not all in a professional capacity and I don't claim that, but I'm not qualified for these positions; I just don't really have any other option but to chance it.

My question is, are qualified people actually hired through this channel, or are these postings just a formality so they can bypass some bureaucratic requirement?

Edit: Is it worth spending the time on a decent cover letter that indicates I'd be interested in discussing a lower seniority position if they don't consider me qualified for the Staff or higher? Also, this isn't relegated to startup land, more traditional online retailers, and others who's core competency isn't necessarily software

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> only advertise positions for people who are comically well-decorated; Principal engineers with 10 years of experience, plus the masters degree, plus a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium.

You don’t need to spend 15 years at the same company or at FAANG to acquire these skills.

One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times. It can take some deliberate planning to work your way upward over time and across companies rather than repeating the same arc over and over again.

Another trap is when people who want to be high-level ICs end up in management for a while, slowly getting further and further from working on the tech.

In this job market it’s hard to go from unemployed in one country to direct hire Principal in another country unless you have an extraordinary skill set. It will make more sense to get your foot in the door at any job that might work, then move up from there.

> their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience

This is difficult to avoid because most companies don't have a progressively more complex requirements for people to learn from.

Then either jump jobs or get promoted. This is the nature of tech. High risk, high reward. Work for the public sector e.g. US Digital Service if you just want something boring and stable.

For a lot of people the only option is to jump jobs. At small and mid size companies, it's literally not possible to have the impact of an L6+ Google equivalent most of the time. Rough for people not working in the tech industry and wanting to get in, but that's why you get downleveled and honestly it's usually appropriate even if your previous title was staff and now you're a SWE2 or senior.

"One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times."

This could also be worded as:

"One issue that a lot of people face is that they did not work at prestigious technical companies. Having a long tenure at such companies gives hiring managers confidence in placing them into principal level roles, regardless of what the candidate actually learned at said company. Everything is about the illusion of competence."

Disagree. I've worked with engineers who were taking on much more business responsibility after two years than others who are basically moderately proficient code bots after twenty. There is a huge difference in competency at the stuff that scales well, such that some people don't even notice it's a skill at all and others instantly gravitate to it it. Principal roles are for the people who learn to do them (with some error bars of course.. And everyone knows when that happens).

Can you provide an example where this has happened both outside of a FAANG and outside of management?

I once worked as the sole maintainer of an old legacy product while the company spent 2 years trying to create a new product to replace it. Eventually they abandoned all work and most of the team left.

During the transition months, I managed to convince upper management that now would be a good time to update the legacy product with all the knowledge gained over the past years.

So I spent about a couple of months or more (fuzzy memory) directing a group of people more skilled and talented than me, converting a coffeescript codebase to typescript, fixing a whole bunch of bugs and performance issues and updated a neglected codebase to something they can actually hire people to work on.

After that experience, I was promoted to tech director and leveraged that to become tech lead at future jobs.

Thanks for the example. I suppose that's a fairly unique position to be in, but one that you could have chosen not to pursue. On the surface, the only way that's different than my most recent experience is that of being the director of the initiative, or otherwise responsible for the whole project, (also being laid off doesn't help). Do you think things would have gone differently had people not jumped ship?

It's definitely a case of 'right time, right place'. But I also had several factors that helped increase my luck surface [0].

- I had experience with early versions of angular.js (1.2~) and typescript (1.x~)

- I was willing to dive into an unknown codebase in an unknown language (coffeescript 1.x) that no one else wanted to touch

- I had almost a whole year to get familiar with the codebase, the intricacies and weird bugs, and the crazy amounts of OOP in it

- I came from the old definition of full stack (design + dev + database + user facing), making me a generalist among a bunch of technically minded people

Also, everyone was pretty demotivated and mentally checked out. Some had spent 2.5 years working on the project, there was a public launch for the beta release, press releases and a whole PR event to our existing users. Less than a month later, the board/investors cancelled the project. Even the CTO was pretty checked out and let me do whatever I want, which was probably how my crazy proposal got through. Within 2 months, we lost the entire upper senior engineering division, from CTO down to team leads. There was a huge debate about whether or not to even keep the engineering division, if it would be better to sell our current product to our rivals and re-focus on being a design agency. That didn't happen because our rivals came to us first asking if we would buy them...

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525

I just think you arent cynical enough about how people are evaluated

When you've worked with truly exceptional people it becomes clear that there truly are 10x and 100x engineers and it's not just that some people did better at politics.

But plenty of companies don't know about this and do succumb to stupid politics. It's a tragedy, really.

I think it's closer to "companies won't hire people to do $THING unless they've done $THING before." That, combined with overinflating requirements, interviews that don't bear a lot of resemblance to the actual job, and interviews that are far more difficult than the actual job, plus perhaps a dose of what you said, seems to explain it. The first of these things is probably related to having people with HR or sales backgrounds (recruiters) reading resumes without understanding what they're reading. The latter two seems mostly like cargo culting FAANG interviews (and, from what I hear, even FAANG interviews are the same in the sense of not being all that related to the actual job yet also being more difficult).

> companies won't hire people to do $THING unless they've done $THING before

For arbitrary magic variable $THING, this is a tautology!

I suppose the nature of that quote is more about the exaggerated nature of the requirements compared to the rather unlikely ability to fulfill those requirements without gradually climbing at a company with an endless level of advancement in an IC role, but not excluding the possibility it could be done otherwise. That said, I definitely suffer from this problem, but it's in-part a result of both no clear way to advance in most circumstances, and repeated volatility in both the market, world, and my life. Now, there aren't jobs to advance from, even if I could land one, and prior to being laid off, I'd most likely have just continued doing either my regular course of work or eventually being offered a managing role. My impression is that it would be a rare circumstance to be offered a higher level IC position at a different company without making a horizontal move in role and building the trust there.

I wouldn't say I've actually repeated the same arc ever, it would just seem that way on the surface, and maybe I should think about how to make it not seem that way.

Disagree on the country statement. it requires certain achievements, but by no means extraordinary.

For example, very common to see European PhD graduates move to usa as their first job as staff or principal.

IMHO, the very specific requirements with no wiggle room, especially if they have very specific requests for how to apply are likely in support of immigration requirements. For some immigration processes, the hiring company needs to show that there were no qualified domestic candidates despite doing a search.

If it's a lot of things with this or that, and the submission isn't send postal mail to this address with this reference etc etc, maybe it's just picky recriting.

I wonder if this is what happened to me. I'm finishing up my PhD and despite being pretty set on going into academia, I applied to some industry jobs back in July that I was pretty uniquely qualified for based on my background and research topic (which is pretty niche). Never heard back. I have a nice postdoc lined up, so it's fine that I never heard back, but I was pretty surprised.

I recently checked and one of those job postings expired and was replaced with an equivalent posting in December. The other job posting (from a different company) is still open.

Did the job specify that they were fine with 0 years of full time industry experience in that area?

Please don't be antagonistic. I went back for a PhD after working over a decade in industry, where I had been both a lead overseeing a team of 25 contributors and an engineering manager.

Channeling dang:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Yes, but the market is particularly bad now.

I have 15+ YoE, and currently working at FAANG. I've spent the last few years leading a team of engineers to deliver one of the top priority projects of my org with estimated impact of +$100M ARR, and I have been consistently rated high performer. I also have some niches skills that are particularly on demand these days. I am not actively looking, but I am open to hear from recruiters. Due to my situation, I only entertain Staff+ roles or equivalent.

Recently a well known company (not big tech) reached out for a Staff role. After the initial screening, the recruiter came back to me saying that they could loop me for a senior role, because my experience doesn't match the expectations of a Staff role.

I honestly don't know what to make of this exchange. Is the market unreasonably tough these days or are my expectations too high?

I think this is just the market trying to find a discount. If you actually want to see what the market is, list yourself as looking for work, take the interviews, excel, and negotiate the position you want. Worst case you hear “no” but don’t let that define your worth. After 15 years at a FAANG you must be drowning in money, do what you find intriguing, regardless of title.

A few implicit assumptions in your comment.

> After 15 years at a FAANG you must be drowning in money

I have 15 yoe total, not all in FAANG. And almost all my career is in EU anyway. My net worth is probably an order of magnitude smaller than you think. If you worked an average software dev job in the US for 15 you almost certainly have more money than me. Also, as a 40 years old renting a 2 bedroom with my family, I am still motivated by money.

> list yourself as looking for work, take the interviews

I've been doing this for months. My tally is something like this: about half of the recruiters ghost me, I got one rejection and two downlevels. I can count with one hand the number of companies that I've talked to that can match or beat my current comp. For reference, I receive one contact or more a day from recruiters on average.

Ah, well I can’t speak to the market in the EU, but in SF (US) the market for your talent set is robust. I know because I just went through it and I can’t see your resume but it sounds like we’re similar. I had more interest than I could handle, and ended with multiple offers that are above TC and promotions to principal level.

Talk to the talent orgs at VCs.

Actually I moved to the US last year so this experience is currently in the Seattle area :/

> estimated impact of +$100M ARR

Revenue impact can be tricky, because more times than not - it’s a function of the size of the company you work for more than anything else.

Relative impact (%), along with absolutely impact ($) - is the more meaningful way to quantify impact.

  Increase revenue by 0.1% (revenue went from $100.0B to $100.1)

  Increase revenue by 100% (revenue went from $0.1B to $0.2)

Size of company also correlates to less low hanging fruit which in my experience mostly balances things out.

It doesn't balance things out; it just makes them incomparable. It also depends on how mature the product is.

You are right that big scale and high margins means that a small effort can have an outsized impact. I use ARR as a proxy for the importance of the project. To give you the details, the relative impact is in the 1-10% range for my org. This was a multi-year, multi-team effort to deliver a significantly complex and ambiguous system (the first of it's kind in my org) and it will have a big impact beyond the monetary value.

To your last question, I suspect neither. I think screener was inaccurate.

You can barely get director with 1billion+ direct revenue from a division you start. Or even 1billion monthly active users at FAANG now. You have to solve specific political quagmires that affect the whole company.

Then when you leave every company thinks you’re insanely over qualified.

What is your current level? Is it shown on your LinkedIn?

The EU market is rough right now, as you say. The down-level to senior usually happens on the system design and behavioral interviews. Especially in Europe, I find people often downplay their contributions in these interviews, while the Americans are almost brazen in claiming credit. To an interviewer, that might sound like you were just “around” when good things happened. If I were you, I’d do a mock interview with someone you trust, and see if they can help you spot where you’re selling yourself short, maybe.

Sounds like there was a team that only had an L5 position open, and they were hoping you'd entertain that.

In some companies, staff positions can only be effectively done by someone who has been there for 10 years. They know the specific tech stack that the company uses, know the application, know where the bodies are buried, and everyone in the company trusts them. It's basically impossible for someone to parachute in and do the job.

Yes, I’ve hired for such senior level roles though a job posting or recruiter. I haven’t kept track, but I’d guesstimate that over my career it’s been 1/3 each of promotions, references, and hiring from some kind of advertising/recruiting.

Just a single data point and a personal opinion, take with a grain of salt.

The companies do hire principal and staff levels from such postings (as well as from other channels). But even more important, many companies are open to hire at a different level. They create a single posting (e.g., to avoid HR hassles) and if the person they like is at a different level they will adjust it in parallel with sending an offer. So unless it is clear that the company only needs principal level hires I would send a resume there as well.

For example, HR might give the hiring manager a single slot and insists on having a specific level in the posting. What this often leads to is the hiring manager aims as high as HR lets him (usually easier to hire at a lower level than approved than at the higher level). Those 2-3 levels might end up as a union of all requirements and skill lists can get ridiculous. Bottom line -- if the company is interesting and your skills are relevant I would apply.

The market today is not great. Many companies overhired during zero interest and covid stimulus times and are now reverting to the mean. IMO it will get worse before it gets better as unprofitable companies run out of money. So I would focus on areas where there should be less competition: secondary metros (not bay area); larger, profitable companies (expand beyond software-specific companies); hybrid or on-site jobs (fully remote are especially competitive now); etc.

If you apply, apply well: have a few polished resumes and, if needed a good cover letter (no need to be super company-specific; put company name, copy-paste 2-3 main relevant points from your database of snippets and let ChatGPT fix the style). Good luck!

The tech job market is the worst I've seen since the dotcom bust. What makes it worse is that hiring has been really incredible the previous 10 years, so there's an entire generation of tech workers that have no idea what a "normal" or "bad" job market is like.

My advice is assume there are 1000 people applying for the same job as you, and you need to tailor every single resume for the job. If it says "Staff" just go for it and don't downplay your experience. Give it your best and let THEM be the one that tells you you're not qualified. Make it your job to study and be so well prepared that they can't tell if you are qualified or not.

I'm assuming that the job market will be bad like this for another 2-3 years so buckle up.

I was. I started as a staff IC at FANG after replying to a posting on the public careers website.

Don't assume every job listing is just for a single open position. For more junior positions, there may be several vacancies.

> a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium

all of these skills are also achievable within a couple years by being a relatively trusted engineer at a startup

nothing is more heart-pounding than the first time you push an update to 100 thousand people, with no guardrails but the ones you yourself have installed

People keep mentioning roles, such as Staff, Staff+, Principle as if they are standardized. Can someone point to a reference where these are defined in a standard way?

As far as I know they're not defined in any standard way, the attributes I mentioned were taken from a few that had open at the time.

More years of experience do not equal staff engineer. The terminal position for most is some sort of senior engineer level.

It might be helpful to consider the manager equivalent which is like a high level director or low level vp.

In part it is helpful as the role has some similarities in that it involves influence. It’s a more difficult position perhaps, since the influence required comes without the same power. The highest level roles can include influence outside the organization as well.

I didn't get the jobs but I've gone through interviews for staff jobs and know others that have too.

For the edit, idk if anyone reads cover letters, but I bring it up with the recruiter durring the initial call that staff mignt be a reach for me and it it doesn't work out lower levels would be ok

Yes, people at staff+ level are routinely hired. But these are typically very senior positions and you are expected to be in some way transformative. Staff engineers are roughly equivalent seniority to a manager of 6-12 people and should bring significant domain expertise. Principal is an end-career role a small fraction of people reach after 30 years in the industry. They’re roughly equivalent to a director, who in the FAANG model leads 50-500 people.

It’s not surprising that the requirements are very high. These roles exist to fill a specific business need.

Caveat: this all applies to FAANG and adjacent. Other industries use different titles, but the use of the word “staff” usually indicates that you’ve adapted the Google career ladder.

I wouldn't worry about crazy requirements; they aren't hard and fast. There have been hilarious examples of this. DHH, the creator of Rails, once posted about a job posting asking for ten years of Rails experience when at the time Rails was something like nine years old, meaning he was the only person on the planet qualified for the job.

Job postings are often run through HR, who typically lack enough context for the role to know what they truly need. They put in the usual language and pad the requirements. Think about what the real role is, and OBJECTIVELY ask yourself if you could do that job. For example, someone with three years of hard-core React is probably what they really need when they say they want someone with 15 years of Javascript.

The silly React requirements were definitely what I have been seeing for years prior, but now it's a bit more tenuous

Yes they do. One of my current search jobs (no pun intended) on LinkedIn is "staff engineer", two of the others being "architect", and "consultant".

And while the amount of jobs on that level is - understandably - a lot smaller than lets say "senior software engineer" they still pop up because while there is a enormous demand on the junior/senior level (and quite some supply) highly skilled people who can perform on beyond that are extremely scarce while there is quite some demand due to a ever expanding IT market.

At least especially here in Northern Europe, YMMV.

I think they want the same thing they do at lower levels - prestigious school degrees, and without that, it's a total crap shoot.

yes, have hired for both from posting roles (900 person engineering team at a public company)

I was never a "Principal Software Engineer" until two years ago. Both hires were from an online job posting, one on the company site itself. Both jobs were government contract companies but salaried roles. And salary is it, no stock or end of year bonus. Both paid about half of what a MAANGA job would pay for the same role, but still far more than other similar remote roles, and a bit better than the senior software engineer roles.

I've also applied to all the standard tech companies over the years, but have never once received an interview. I don't really blame them, I'm not some stellar candidate, but I still do it just in case I get lucky. I've had colleagues who couldn't debug a program to save their life (I know because I did it for them) making several times my pay now at the name brand techbro places. I also know some very good devs I worked with at these companies too. I can't say there is anything different about them on average than anyone anywhere else I've worked, so don't give up if you really want to work there. One guy I know finally made it in after nine years of not getting in, and is getting a huge salary, and major recognition for his work, and promotions, so it can happen, just like winning the lottery happens.

Outside the super-compensated roles there often are a dearth of people applying with both 10+ years experience AND competence in the requested tech stack. That being said, the interviews are totally a crap shot. I've had ones where I aced every question and they passed on me. I've had others where I didn't know a lot of what they wanted but they were sufficiently impressed to give me an offer.

Stop thinking about actual ability to do anything and start seeing it for what it is, a game, or better yet, a gamble. You just keep rolling the dice and hope something lands.

For myself, in the current environment over the past two years it's been taking 6+ months of looking constantly doing 1+ hours of applications and interviews daily before I received one or more offers. No cover letter, but spending money on recruiters reviewing and recommending changes to my resume, and applying like a madman at literally thousands of positions on job boards and directly with the company. Have gotten ghosted, gone through five rounds only to not receive an offer, all the normal stuff you hear about.

Generally I've been receiving maybe one or two HR callbacks for every hundred or two hundred applications. Of those HR callbacks maybe half I make it past the tech screening to the first interview. Another half or less I get to a final round. So all in all I've been doing a few hundred applications over several months for a single offer.

If I was really desperate, which I was in the past dotcom and 2008 crash, I would take one of the horrible W2 contract roles that pay barely above McDonalds wages. I've had these sustain me from going homeless for up to a year before I could get something more in line with a regular salaried job at more typical engineer pay. But I'd take those jobs in a heartbeat if I had no other job lined up.

Note I just went to state school with a bachelors, have no top tech companies in my record, am well over 40, and haven't really achieved anything other than getting back up on my feet after getting repeatedly knocked over by downsizing and offshoring.

Good luck, and don't give up. If the Irish can achieve independence after 800 years of subjugation, it's a reminder even in a tech down economy we can find our place in the sun too.

Bless, we have ~same story except I dropped out of the state school with a 2.8, and got into Google in 2016 due to what amounted to luck, I didn't even have other offers for the W2 McDonald's jobs. Life is a crapshoot and there wasn't a significant difference between my coworkers there and coworkers I've had everywhere else.

> got into Google in 2016 due to what amounted to luck

Would love to hear more details on how this happened if you don't mind sharing.

I'll take any excuse to talk about myself ;) Thank you for being curious -

I just absolutely do not buy that I took ~5 CS classes and did a great job on the interview questions.

I don't think I did a great job -- but, I was a deeply specialized self-taught iOS engineer who had built a point of sale.

When you're at Google, work is more episodic and less in-depth, so I had a seemingly unusually wide and in-depth knowledge base.

And iOS devs were considered hard to get. And Google had a special focus internally on getting iOS-specific interviewers who, at least in 2016, usually did a lot of work with non-iOS specialists.

So you have these sort of inherent biases towards me seeming relatively impressive to their day-to-day experience with other Googlers. Then, I'm fairly convinced the leetcode problems we do add a significant "luck" portion.

I spent about 6 hours a day, 6 weeks before interviews, in Cracking the Coding Interview and was still missing problems in the 1st chapter towards the end.

I'm selling myself short, probably. But looking back, I see it as luck, structural factors, and what pushed it over the top was focusing on communication / thinking out loud in the interviews. As long as you're intelligent, familiar with the material, and your interlocutor is having an okay day, you'll come off well.

Thanks for the thorough response, I feel like you and I aren't so dissimilar in terms of background and perspective in various categories. It's somehow reassuring, because although I haven't been through previous downtowns in the broader economy, I have got through dark periods of years where I couldn't land anything, and I have ended up without more than a car roof over my head. This time is just.. uniquely intense. What I anticipate happening is that like you say, I'll land some random interview and it'll work out, or I'll go back to being a barista or general labor if I can land something there. I'm not really seeing contracts working out yet.

Your experience with interviews and rate of response feels very familiar. Roles I'm definitely qualified for and interviewed well with just not turning out at the last step, and every other variation of it being a dice roll.

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